Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction

ISBN-13: 9783030278953 / Angielski / Miękka / 2021 / 335 str.

Zachary Kendal; Aisling Smith; Giulia Champion

Spis treści

1. Science Fiction’s Ethical Modes: Totality and Infinity in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s Мы (We), Zachary Kendal.- 2. Inversion and Prolepsis: Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Feminist Utopian Strategies, Sreejata Paul.- 3. Better Societies for the Ethical Treatment of Animals: Vegetarianism and the Utopian Tradition, Joshua Bulleid.- 4. Eutopia, Dystopia and Climate Change, Andrew Milner.- 5. Evolving a New, Ecological Posthumanism: An Ecocritical Comparison of Michel Houellebecq’s Les Particules élémentaires and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy, Rachel Fetherston.- 6. The Perverse Utopianism of Willed Human Extinction: Writing Extinction in Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (三体), Thomas Moran.- 7. Ecopocalyptic Visions in Haitian and Mexican Landscapes of Exploitation, Giulia Champion.- 8. Postcolonial Science Fiction and the Ethics of Empire, Bill Ashcroft.- 9. The Postcolonial Cyborg in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome, Nudrat Kamal.- 10. Wagering the Future: Split Collectives and Decolonial Praxis in Assia Djebar’s Ombre Sultane and Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, Lara Choksey.- 11. Rewriting France’s Future: From Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Pre-Revolutionary Projections to Michel Houellebecq’s Islamic Agendas via Secular State Ethics, Jacqueline Dutton.- 12. The Appearance of Dystopian Fiction in Macedonia and its Ethical Concerns, Kalina Maleska.- 13. Cairo in 2015 and in 2023: The Dreadful Fates of the Egyptian Capital in Jamil Nasir’s Tower of Dreams and Ahmed Khaled Towfik’s Utopia, Anna Madoeuf & Delphine Pagès-El Karoui.- 14. Post-Capitalist Futures: A Report on Imagination, Nick Lawrence.

O autorze

Zachary Kendal is a librarian in Rare Books at Monash University Library, Australia. He was recently an editor-in-chief of Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique and is completing a PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies at Monash University, researching ethics and literary representation in science fiction.

Aisling Smith is a teaching associate in literary studies at Monash University and Deakin University, Australia. Her PhD examined affect theory and the works of David Foster Wallace. She is also a creative writer, former editor-in-chief of Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique and an editor of the Verge: Chimera (2017) anthology.

Giulia Champion is completing her doctoral thesis at the University of Warwick, UK. Her research investigates postcolonial literature in original languages and aims to theorise literary cannibalism as a set of practices through the world ecology framework and historical materialism.

Andrew Milner is Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Monash University, Australia, and Honorary Professor at University of Warwick, UK. He is the author of numerous books including, most recently, Locating Science Fiction (2012), Again, Dangerous Visions: Essays in Cultural Materialism (2018) and, with J. R. Burgmann, Science Fiction and Climate Change (in press).

Blurb

Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction explores the ethical concerns and dimensions of representations of the future of global science fiction, focusing on the issues that dominate utopian, dystopian, and science fiction literature. The essays examine recent visions of the future in science fiction and re-examine earlier texts through contemporary lenses. Across fourteen chapters, the collection considers authors from Algeria, Australia, Canada, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Macedonia, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, the UK and USA. The volume delves into a range of ethical questions of immediate contemporary relevance, including environmental ethics, postcolonial ethics, social justice, animal ethics and the ethics of alterity.